Analysis on Meaning and Current Research of Holonic Manufacturing Execution Systems

Abstract

Systematic analysis is made on meaning and current research of Holonic Manufacturing Execution Systems (HMES). Characteristics of HMES are pointed out. It lies in the distributed structure and distributed decision-making mechanism come from holon, as well as the essence of being a shopfloor management information system. Papers on HMES are analyzed from three aspects: control framework construction, development framework and implementation. Control framework construction is the main research direction. Most of the frameworks are built on PROSA, and concentrated with emphasis on real-time scheduling on the manufacturing execution process to gain an optimized solution when faced random disturbance. As opposed to traditional legacy Manufacturing Execution Systems (MES) and framework MES, HMES has certain superiority, implementation and application of HMES also have good prospect. But because of the limitation of distributed decision-making mechanism, practical application has certain difficulty, which leads to the research work relatively slow.